


that goblin cry

by maelidify



Category: The 100
Genre: Changelings, F/M, Mention of Past Abuse, Murphy POV, a bit of Drugs, clarke is a bit of a jerk in this sorry, different kind of apocalypse au, fairy tale ish?, he thinks with properly capitalized letters this time, slight language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-27
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2018-12-20 18:07:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11926338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maelidify/pseuds/maelidify
Summary: "Trikru believes in moorfolk," Emori says after a short pause. He didn’t mind the silence, sitting with her, feeling the heat of her body so close to his. But hearing her voice is good too. It’s low and clear, like a stream. He would say he wanted to drink from it, were he the type.





	that goblin cry

**Author's Note:**

> This is still a post-apoc setting, but it takes place after a different, slower kind of apocalypse. Society has slowly dissolved, and people have broken into towns and clans, never feeling quite safe. Has superstition returned because of this? Maybe.

It is in the rain that the roamers come, and John Murphy watches them from the window of the medicine shack, their tall, weary forms and distrustful eyes. They hold their weight in a way Murphy recognizes; it means they’re ready for a fight.  
  
He watches all day, between getting supplies for Abby and goading her daughter, Clarke. He should relinquish that habit. In this disintegrating time, the After, as people call it, each village needs something like structure. Leadership. Abby and her daughter offer the closest cousin to that—a healer-king and her princess of a daughter. Murphy watches the golden-haired girl speaking to a roamer outside, another woman—slim and pale and dark-eyed. Soft through her intelligent face. Just Clarke’s type.

“An awful lot of wagons,” Murphy says.  
  
“Get back to work,” Abby says. The words aren’t harsh so much as distracted; she is sewing up a gash in Jasper Jordan’s leg, and the other boy is whimpering. Murphy doesn’t want to look at him, so he ignores Abby and keeps watching, polishing the same scalpel over and over.  
  
Clarke and the woman disappear, and the other roamers follow, leading horses and wagons. Their hands run over their weapons. No guns, seemingly, but it isn’t surprising. Guns are a rare commodity these days.  
  
The last member of the group pulls a small cart, approaching the village long after the rest have passed through to the woods slightly beyond Arcadia. It makes Murphy think of his old town— how they travelled together briefly after the Fall, looking for a safe place, and how Murphy had to bring up the rear of the group when he was sick. It was a place of shame.   
  
This last roamer is a woman. Idly, Murphy watches how her damp hair clings to the side of her tattooed cheek. She doesn’t seem to notice. Her skin is golden, a richer and darker gold than Clarke’s hair, and the tattoo is a diagonal swirl across her face.  
  
She steals a tomato from a vendor’s stand, and then looks straight at him. Murphy is startled, but something sharp smiles through him.  
  
\---  
  
The following morning, Murphy wakes up just before the sun’s rising. This happens a lot. His mother died at sunrise, and a woman once hurt him very badly at sunrise, and then again and again. His heart quickens as it grows lighter outside. It’s just how things are.  
  
He stays in the same house as a lot of their residents, a sprawling old repurposed hotel near the square. It smells musty and the walls are peeling, but as structures go, it’s secure. The steps creak loudly as he leaves, but he doesn’t hear anyone else stirring.  
  
The town is still sleeping, even though Monty is setting up his cart in the square and Jasper is curled up in a ball next to him, blood seeping through his bandage. Murphy approaches, feeling the rising of the light like cold electricity on the back of his head. It is autumn now, or something like it, and everything feels thin, like something is cracking through.  
  
“I see too much of him at Abby’s,” he tells Monty. He is tempted to kick Jasper, to see if he moves.  
  
“If I give you weed, will you stop talking to me?” Monty says. He rolls his shoulders and he looks tired, weary, weighed-down.  
  
“Absolutely.” He doesn’t blame Monty for his exhaustion, but he also doesn’t particularly want to stop and chat. Not that anyone relished a chat with him, especially Monty, an old friend of Wells’. Murphy’s presence in Arkadia is tolerated, and he manages to pick fewer fights than he used to, but the peace is tenuous.    
  
Tenuous peace is better than none. At least for now.  
  
Weed in tow, he walks away toward the roamer camp in the woods. He has been listening to his village’s reaction to the outsiders, and they aren’t happy, but what can they do about it?  
  
He probably shouldn’t trust them either, but he feels pulled to the woods by something ephemeral, something inexplicable. He doesn’t believe in shit like that, so he figures it’s the girl with the stolen tomato. He needs to find out her name; he’s curious. That’s all.

The roamer camp is all cloth and wagons and embers. He quietly circles the perimeter, keeping a good distance. There are men and women on watch and he carefully avoids the areas where they patrol.  
  
“Not very light on your feet, are you?”  
  
He freezes. Turns.  And there she is, sitting cross-legged on a fallen tree trunk, sharpening a knife.  
  
His throat goes dry as a leaf. “Uh. I was doing okay, I thought.”  
  
“It’s not just the sticks you need to avoid.” She isn’t meeting his gaze. The rock she holds scrapes the knife five more times, and then she sticks the weapon in her boot and stands up, rolling her shoulders. She is small. Her tangled hair reaches her elbows.  
  
“What else?” He wants to walk closer. He doesn’t walk closer. When she finally looks him in the face, her eyes are so dark in front of the rising sun that he can’t see the pupils.   
  
“Leaves, acorns. Figure out what the wind’s doing and try to do the same thing.”  
  
He laughs at that. There’s a half-smile on her face, and he can’t figure out if she’s serious or not.  
  
“I saw you in the window,” she says. Her voice is dark and curious.  
  
“Do you know how hard Monty works to grow those tomatoes?” he counters.  
  
She grins, almost mischievous, and sits back down on the log, patting a space to her left. The fingers on that hand, he notices, are long and twisted. Beautiful and strange. She sees that he sees, and keeps his gaze like a challenge.  
  
He sits.  
  
\---  
  
He finds out her name is Emori. She and her late brother were orphaned when they were children, back in the early days of society’s collapse. They became scavengers; a risky life.   
  
 “Trikru took us in because of our ability to trade,” she tells him, and he almost laughs at what the roamers call themselves. _Trikru._ He thinks of a band of angry oaks, wrathful willows. He thinks they might be sitting on a child redwood.

The fallen tree is where she has made camp, just outside where the others sleep. As they speak, she fiddles with an old ipad, wrenching the back from the machine and snapping it back again. “I go on missions, find old laptops and cell phones and TVs, tear them apart and sell them piece by piece. It does benefit the clan. I get some good deals for food. Otan and I perfected it.”  
  
“I’m sure,” Murphy says, wondering how many good deals she got when no one was watching their merchandise. He also wonders at the small twinge of pain that breaks through her voice when she talks about her brother. He wants to reach out, to touch her shoulder, but his hands stay where they are.    
  
“And in return,” she continues, “they provide protection.”  
  
“But you’re not one of them.” He states it as a fact and she looks away.  
  
“I get it,” he says, hoping he isn’t sticking his foot in his mouth. She doesn’t seem to dislike him instinctively, and that’s a personal best for him. “I don’t belong with my people either.”  
  
“Why not?”  
  
He hesitates. He can see her pupils now. He can see the way she stares at him, not up at him but right at him. She’s small, but she looks like some sort of storm boiled down into skin. It’s overwhelming to look at her, but he does, and he finds himself talking.  
  
He tells her about traveling to Arkadia after his parents died, and Wells being killed with his knife, and the hanging, and the people he hurt and killed afterwards. And he tells her that they only let him back in after he was captured by the Ice roamers and escaped, barely able to walk.  
  
“My people aren’t superstitious,” he says, finally. “They try not to be, at least. But they think I’m bad luck. Fortunately, for me, they think kicking me out again would be bad luck too.”  
  
“It would curse them,” she says, as though it’s a logical thing to say. He nods once.  
  
“ _Trikru_ believes in moorfolk,” Emori says after a short pause. He didn’t mind the silence, sitting with her, feeling the heat of her body so close to his. But hearing her voice is good too. It’s low and clear, like a stream. He would say he wanted to drink from it, were he the type.  
  
“Moorfolk?”  
  
“If a child is born wrong, they believe the real child was taken by the fair people. In its place, the fairies leave a disfigured child of theirs. A changeling.” The words come out swiftly, like she has said them a lot.  
  
“Ah,” he says.  
  
“That child is a curse. A dark fairy. And two? Very dangerous. But,” and she looks at him again, that storm, that vague smile, “I do good work. I get them a lot of food and coats and aspirin.”  
  
“Steal, you mean,” he says, and when she laughs, he realizes their hands are touching.  
  
“Come back tonight,” she says. His nose is almost touching her hair. How did they get this close? “But don’t tell anyone.”  
  
“My people don’t believe in changelings,” he says. Her hand is warm and rough under his, and she smells like pine.  
  
“Even so.”  
  
He agrees, and feels her shadow watching as he walks away.  
  
It takes him an hour to realize the bag of Monty’s weed is missing from his pocket.  
  
\---  
  
At Abby's, Murphy tries to focus on a long line of stitches. The stitches run down a long, pale arm, and that arm belongs to Clarke Griffin.  
  
“Your mom’s gonna see, you know,” he says.  
  
“Shut up. Just try to finish it.” Clarke is biting her lip, taking the pain impressively. Murphy has a strange relationship with pain. He used to enjoy administering it, back before Wells. The fights he got into gave him a reputation, and he has been trying to curb the violent tendencies.  
  
He even enjoyed receiving pain a little too, until Ontari.  
  
Working here for Abby and her daughter gives him a strange sense of catharsis. He doesn’t regret his past, but there’s something new and valuable about knowing you can stop someone’s pain, or heal someone’s body, just a little. Maybe it’s the power.  
  
“Try to at least make them even,” his patient chastises.  
  
Not that he’s very good at it.  
  
Clarke looks tired; the fingers of her other hand grip Abby’s makeshift medical table with whitened knuckles, and there are dark circles under her eyes. She looks paler than usual.  
  
“How’d you get this, anyway?” he asks casually. He is tempted to make the next stitch uneven. He doesn’t. “Piss off a bear? Or Niylah?”  
  
She glares at him. Then she sighs.  
  
“I’m sure everyone will find out anyway.” And she explains her meeting with the roamer leaders the night previous. They had talked until the morning, and settled upon an agreement; they could stay in their woods through the autumn and winter, and they would, in return, protect the village.  
  
“That definitely sounds like a situation where someone would try to slice your arm off,” Murphy says.  
  
“As I was leaving, there were… shouts. One of their children died in the night. They blamed me, for some reason. Because I’m not one of them, I guess.” Her laugh is empty. “Lexa—their leader said it wasn’t my fault, but the mother still attacked me.”  
  
“Nice people. You’re all done.” He steps back to wash his hands in the basin, his mind turning that information over. A tense situation with a roaming clan is the last thing they need.

“You know they believe in fairies?” he says lightly, his back to Clarke.  
  
“Everything believes in something,” she responds. The words are slow. She doesn’t know what he’s getting at. He’s said too much; his hands look strange and pale in the water, two narrow identical fish.  
  
“Don’t I know it,” he says.

\---  
  
Murphy decides to try to sneak up on Emori that night.  
  
He approaches her little camp from behind. She is kindling a fire, kneeling over it, and a hint of copper gleams in her dark hair. Fuck. His brain won’t leave her alone, the form of her, the contained energy, the quickness of her mind. He barely knows her but he feels like he’s known her for a very long time.  
  
He plans on whispering something in her ear. He doesn’t know why, or what. He sees a sliver of her face illuminated by the fire and shivers. His feet avoid twigs, and acorns, and leaves, and when he slowly crouches in back of her, something warm twining in his stomach, he hears a soft laugh.  
  
“Better,” she says.  
  
“I’m surprised I got this far,” he says. She hasn’t turned around. He looks at the braided mass of her hair, and the soft line of her neck, right in front of him, and the curve of her ear. He still wants to whisper into it.  
  
“You’re lucky I like you,” she says. “Or else you would have been a goner five minutes ago.”  
  
He believes her. Before he can think about it too hard, he leans forward, his nose pressing against the curve of her neck. She smells like smoke.  
  
Her intake of breath is sharp, but she leans into him, the back of her body pressing into his front. He wants to whisper _please_ into her skin, right where her shoulder meets her neck. He presses a small kiss there instead, like a question.  
  
“Careful,” she says. “Do you know what changelings do to men?”  
  
“I’d honestly love to find out,” he murmurs and she laughs and shifts until she’s facing him, until they’re sitting face to face in the dirt.  
  
“Liar,” she challenges.  
  
“Try me.” His pride has completely disintegrated. He has never met someone who fits him like this, whose words fit into his words like clasped hands. It’s unsettling, painful almost. Maybe he likes pain.  
  
“I might.” She grins and stands, walking over to a pile of things stacked by her cart.  
  
“Don’t you have something of mine?” he calls, and she returns with some shabby-looking cigarette paper and his bag from earlier.  
  
“I was thinking of selling it,” she said. “Decent pot is rare.”  
  
“Yeah? I could get you more. You don’t have to steal it from me.”  
  
“Mm,” she says, tilting her head and starting to roll the paper. “Where’s the fun in that?”  
  
\---  
  
They get too high to continue what they’d started, that small kiss and that challenge, but he does somehow fall asleep with his head on her stomach, his lips on her navel.  
  
“John,” she says eventually, tugging his hair softly, “John, wake up. Look.”  
  
“I am,” he mutters, blinking at the skin of her hip. He’s still floating. She feels like she’s floating, too, softly floating beneath him. Her skin is pretty and soft and a little scarred in a lot of places. He likes the way her shirt rides up, the sharp curve of her hips.  
  
“No, stupid, look up,” she says, and he does, shifting onto his back.   
  
An owl sits on a high branch, bright white with flecks of black. It’s almost fluorescent in the moonlight. He doesn’t want to be arrested by its beauty, but there it is, and here he is. He lifts his hand and tries to pinch its head between his fingers in perspective.  
  
“ _Who,_ ” Emori says softly and collapses into giggles.  
  
\---  
  
When he walks into Abby's the next day, Clarke is there. That isn’t unusual. She always arrives before her mother.  
  
She looks at him with caution, though.  
  
“Murphy,” she says. Murphy takes a moment to consider the difference between Clarke’s voice saying _Murphy_ and Emori’s voice saying _John_. Emori’s voice never makes him want to roll his eyes, for one thing.  
  
But something’s wrong, so he tries to focus. “What’s going on?”  
  
She bites her lip and sighs. Classic Clarke beating around the bush mannerisms. He glares at her impatiently.  
  
“You were seen with one of the roamers last night,” she finally says.  
  
“So?” he challenges. “You’ve spent some time with them too.” He turns from her and tries to ready the supplies for the day. He pulls the bandages from the drawer, and the herbs from the cupboard. He always gives the surgical tools a good washing, a harsh shine.  
  
“Murphy,” she says more softly, “one of their children _died_. They’re blaming her. That girl you were with.”  
  
He spins around. “ _What?_ ”  
  
“They’ve decided to blame her instead of us. They… they think she’s bad luck because—“  
  
“I know _exactly_ what they think, but you know it’s bullshit, don’t you?”  
  
“Of _course_ I do.” She keeps softening her voice, like she’s speaking to a child. Or a criminal. “But they’ll see your involvement as a betrayal, a taboo. We can’t afford another conflict. We lost so many people to the Ice clan… Fox, Monroe, Finn…”  
  
Her voice cuts off. Bringing up Finn would make anyone else calm down around her, but not Murphy. He realizes the strip of bandages he is holding has ripped in his hands. He doesn’t care.  
  
“Look Murphy… they’re banishing her.”  
  
He stares, uncomprehending.  
  
“Once she’s gone, we can live peacefully with them,” she continues. “We _need_ peace, okay, Murphy? We need protection.”  
  
“But…” He’s at a loss for words. His mouth is a desert. He tries again. “Can’t she…?”  
  
“I wish she could.” Clarke looks away now. “I would give her shelter anywhere if this were _any_ other situation.”  
  
“You know you don’t make the rules, Clarke.” He says it lowly. The bandages drop to the floor and something in him wants to wrap his hands around Clarke’s neck until she’s pale as a ghost. Until she’s a ghost. Something stops him. Maybe it’s the word _ghost_ , and how it makes him think of an owl reclining on a branch, and how that makes him remember Emori’s stomach tensing under his head as she laughed.  
  
He doesn’t know when he started running.  
  
\---  
  
The clearing is bare. Emori’s cart is gone.  
  
\---  
  
When he was a child, Murphy’s father left. He left to get Murphy some medicine, but he remembers that absence all the same, the way his house felt a third emptier when he woke up in the morning. His father never came back, either. It was a chaotic period of the collapse; trying to barter for the commodity of medication could get you killed.  
  
His mother left, too. Every day afterwards, she left a little, disappearing into a drink, and then two, and then bottles upon bottles of it. He could never figure out where she acquired so much alcohol. By the time she died, he barely knew her, but the death was another abandonment, and something inside of him hardened at that point.  
  
When Clarke and one of their other semi-leaders, Bellamy, first banished him, it had been another abandonment. He felt like pieces of himself were being slowly and carefully removed. By the time the Ice clan had him, by the time Ontari decided he was hers every morning, there was barely anything left.  
  
He doesn’t know when he fell, but he’s on the ground, staring at the dry fire pit. There’s an ember slowly fading in the middle of it. Something in his head screams, and he realizes the outside of him is screaming too.  
  
\---  
  
It is nighttime when he returns home to his rundown room.  
  
Murphy likes nighttime. Anything could be in the dark. A monster, or a man or a woman, or a force of chaos. It’s the morning that hurts. He falls onto the bed, something numb spreading throughout him, and falls into a dreamless sleep.  
  
He is awakened by the weight of someone sitting at the foot of his bed.  
  
“Shh,” a low voice says. He bolts up  
  
and there she is.  
  
“You came back,” he says. He can barely see her face in the dark, but something in her eye glints.  
  
“I came back,” she echoes. He reaches for her hands and feels the weight of them, solid and different, in his own. He lifts them to his mouth, and then pulls her toward him, kissing her lips, which are dry and smiling against his, and the storm that is in her is in him too. She’s solid. She’s there.  
  
She came back.    
  
“John,” she says softly, pulling away, “they say the fair people steal men and women from their beds. They say they take them quietly in the night, and they never come back.”  
  
“Do they?”  
  
She stands and twists her hand around the doorknob as he rolls out of bed. The sun is glinting through the window, grey and newly stretching into the sky. They don’t have much time.  
  
Emori turns back to him.  
  
“Are you coming?”

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> .  
> .  
> .  
> .  
> .  
> .  
> .  
> .  
>  "This fairy will also exhibit very dark eyes, which betray a wisdom far older than its apparent years. Changelings display other characteristics, usually physical deformities, among which a crooked back or lame hand are common."  
> -Irelands'seye.com  
>   
>   
> I've been wanting to write this one for a while. 
> 
> As someone with a physical deformity (hi guys I have a clubfoot), I've felt Some Kind of Way about the changeling myth for some time. 
> 
> There's something haunting about it, something beautiful, but also something horrible, oppressive, and ostracizing about the ways people invent excuses to hate other people. Historically, people have been horrible to people. Humans are capable of great fear, but also great love, and all that. I thought Emori would be the perfect character to explore this with. 
> 
> I might write some more memori fairytale aus. :) Also, I haven't given up on Gasoline! I have it all plotted out and everything! 
> 
> Thanks for reading x


End file.
